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Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Album Review: Pitch Black - Filtered Senses (2016)

Here's my review of Pitch Black's Filtered Senses for NZ Musician magazine. I also interviewed Paddy Free for the mag and will link to that at a later date. What a great album this is ...

Filtered Senses is
studio album number five for the pioneering flag bearers of Aotearoa’s rapidly
evolving electronica scene, Pitch Black. It’s the duo’s first full-length
release for nine years, made primarily by sending sound files back and forth
across the globe while its protagonists got on with life in different parts of
the world. Eventually Mike Hodgson (London) and Paddy Free (Piha, New York) got
together to add the spit and polish final touches at Hodgson’s home studio,
with the requisite trademark attention to detail which ensures the end product
doesn’t disappoint. More than that, it works as a timely reminder of just how
much Hodgson and Free still have to offer, and just how cutting edge the pair’s
work has been across two full decades of working together. If anything,
Filtered Senses takes things to a different level; while Pitch Black’s
signature dubby dancefloor textures remain firmly intact, this feels somewhat
darker and denser than anything they’ve done in the past. There’s a claustrophobic,
paranoid, almost post-apocalyptic energy buried somewhere deep in this mix, and
the 8-track album is all the better for the way it rather perfectly represents
the worrying state of our planet as we approach the end of 2016. Looking
forward to the remix version already – if we make it far, that is.